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Treasure
Trove, first published in the The
Times Saturday Magazine on November 8,
1997
Max Valentin is tired, he
is tired of being Max Valentin -- the name he
picked at random out of a phone book: "On the third
attempt because the first two were ridiculous."
This man, overweight, with untidy grey hair and an
unkempt grey beard, is one of the most hunted men
in France. One night four years ago Valentin drove
his car to a secret location, dug a hole 80cm deep,
buried a statue of a bronze owl and challenged his
compatriots to find it. The bronze figure can be
exchanged for a solid gold and silver owl with
diamond cheeks, tiger-eye eyes and a ruby-encrusted
zoisite plinth. It is vulgar but valuable, with a
price tag of one million French Francs. At any one
time over 20,000 people are searching for the owl,
but no one has yet solved the 11 puzzles that
reveal its whereabouts. It began as a game and a
seemingly fun way to make a living, but La Trace
de La Chouette D'Or has come to dominate
Valentin's life with an endless cycle of questions,
love letters, bribes, crank phone calls and death
threats. For many it has become an obsession and a
handful have stopped playing by the rules: instead
of looking for the owl, they are looking for
Valentin.
Before Max became Max he
had an ordinary job, a real life and an unambiguous
identity, about all of which he is understandably
coy. Then one day twenty years ago his boss asked
him organize a treasure hunt for some clients.
Valentin thought he was on to a good thing. During
1978 he spent 450 hours -- "My computer counted
them for me." -- writing the 11 "enigmas" that
would eventually comprise the bulk of his book
"Sur La Trace De La Chouette D'Or". And for
over ten years they sat in the drawer of his
bureau; that is until 1992 when Valentin met the
sculptor, and pretender to the French throne via a
third generation bastard lineage, Michel Becker.
They struck a deal. Valentin would provide the
clues and Becker would paint pictures to go with
them. More significantly, Becker would furnish the
prize. He sculpted an owl, the symbol of the
dispossessed French court during the French
revolution. Valentin buried the owl, with a pick
axe, a spade and a steel bar for protection, in the
early hours of 23 and 24 April 1993. Two days later
he and Becker launched their book which shot into
the bestseller lists with its tantalizing promise
of hidden riches. It was a nice little earner for
Valentin and Becker, but it was not long before
Valentin realized he was going to get more than he
had bargained for.
"At the beginning I would
cross myself every morning. I was scared that
somebody would find it too soon," says Valentin. We
are sitting at the back of a cafÈ in central
Paris out of earshot of the other customers. A few
minutes before we were in a nearby bank with
Valentin's solicitor who holds the key to the
safety deposit box containing the owl. Under the
watchful eye of the bank's head of security the owl
was brought to an ante room where Valentin posed
for photographs with the prize, but only on
condition that we did not name the bank or betray
his anonymity in the pictures. This morning the
solicitor received a phone call from one of the
hunters. "He was very excited and said he knew that
the owl was buried in a cemetery. I don't normally
tell people if they are right or wrong, but
sometimes I have to. We had to stop him digging up
the cemetery," says Valentin seriously, incidents
like this have gone past a joke. He counts off
examples on his fingers: "There was one who tried
to dig up a train track and another who walked into
a bank with a pick axe and started to dig up the
floor of the lobby. I've told everyone it is buried
in a public place but some people are
crazy.
One man called on
Valentin's solicitor carrying a large parcel.
Inside was a road sign still attached to a large
lump of concrete. He had dug it up and insisted
that the owl was buried underneath it.
One morning about two
years ago Valentin received a phone call from the
police somewhere in central France, he has promised
not to say where. They had a problem. The previous
day a man had firebombed a church and left behind a
book containing the message: "The golden owl is
underneath the chapel." The bomb squad were now
defusing another bomb in another church; with it
was the message: "Yesterday I made a mistake, it
was not in the other chapel, it is in this one."
Valentin instantly recognized the style of the
messages. For months he had been receiving letters
via his solicitor from a man who had convinced
himself the buried owl was booby-trapped. His
letters had steadily grown more deranged and he was
sure that Valentin was trying to kill him. "His
letters got crazier and crazier," says Valentin.
"He wrote: 'This morning I got up and found three
white stones by my front door. It means something,
it means you know who I am and you are going to
kill me.'" Valentin had even spoken to the man on
the phone in a vain attempt to reassure him that
the hunt was only a game. The police finally
arrested him and he was admitted to a mental
hospital, but it was a turning point for Valentin.
He understood how far things had gotten out of hand
and he began to wonder if the hunt for the owl was
just a game anymore. He asked himself how long he
could continue playing it.
The search for the owl
should be no more than a game. On page 30 of the
third edition of the book is the first
clue:
Il n'est de pire
aveugle que celui qui ne veut pas voir (The
blindest man is the one who refuses to
see)
1=530
3=470
5=600
7=420
9=650
What on earth does it all
mean? The object is to solve each puzzle in turn.
Together they reveal an area of France and hidden
in each clue is part of a twelfth clue pinpointing
the exact location of the treasure. Seemingly, no
one has even discovered the general area yet, but
that has not stopped over 100 people each day from
excavating the French countryside. Over the years
Valentin has made public announcements telling his
followers that the treasure is not in a particular
area because excessive digging was ruining the
landscape. He recalls: "I found out that late one
night two people met two other people on exactly
the same spot at exactly the same time and they
were all digging for the owl. They all had
completely wrong solutions and their solutions were
all completely different and yet they chose the
same spot. I asked a friend of mine, who is a
mathematician, to calculate the probability of that
happening and he said it couldn't be done. The
chances were a thousand billion to one and yet
there have been at least three similar incidents
that I know of." Valentin has to be careful what he
reveals. A French newspaper published an account of
the night Valentin buried the owl. "I was very
scared that night," he admits. "I had to drive down
a small road through a wood and a car was blocking
my way. It was 2am and there in the middle of the
wood was a man looking for his dog. You won't
believe it but this dog was named Dracula." When
people read this, vets all over France were flooded
with inquiries about the dog. It seems some
treasure hunters will try anything rather than
solve the puzzles.
At the headquarters of the
Association Francaise des Prospecteurs on
the Rue Charles Baudelaire the search for the ever
elusive owl has sparked a huge boom in demand for
metal detectors. A poster on the wall shows a
bikini-clad blonde rising out of the sea
brandishing a metal detector like a machine gun.
Standing in front of the poster is Georges Herment,
the Association's president. Although Georges is a
professional treasure hunter with a passion for
genuine antiquities, he is also a big fan of the
owl hunters: "They're great. When they think
they've solved all the clues and found the treasure
they come in here and hire or even buy a metal
detector," he explains.
"They ask us to go with
them and help them but we won't. They say it's in
Marseilles and we think, 'Of course it is!' Can you
imagine, we have so many of these people coming in
and asking for help. We've had hundreds looking for
the owl and they haven't found it -- they're all
obsessed.
"You see the same faces
coming in again and again. There is one man -- I'd
call him an intellectual -- who has been back ten
times. When he has reworked all the clues he's back
again and this time he is sure but he always
returns with a long face.
"They don't realize that
there is probably a metal plate over the owl and
the detector tells them it is just ordinary metal
and they miss it -- lot's of people have probably
missed it." And Georges is probably right, the last
time Max checked the area to see if the owl was
still there he saw a hole dug near where the owl is
hidden. Meanwhile Georges is counting his pennies,
he charges owl hunter three times the usual price
for hiring a detector and they are happy to pay.
Valentin is amused to hear this. "Good luck to
them. The owl is protected against metal detectors.
They are crazy people, totally crazy." He knows all
too well how crazy.
Valentin anticipated a
large post bag so he set up a Minitel site at 36 15
MAXVAL. Minitel is France's primitive precursor to
the Internet. To date Valentin has received over
one million messages on his five Minitels -- a new
French record -- and for the first two years he
replied to 100,000 messages individually. Valentin
feels a singular sense of duty to the hunters: "I
couldn't go away, or take a holiday for two years,
I was spending 15 hours a day in front of the
Minitel. I remember I once went on a business trip
for four days and when I got back I didn't sleep
for a week trying to catch up with the replies,
working round the clock." Early last year Max
stopped replying to most of the individual
messages, it was destroying his health.
The Minitel has allowed
many treasure hunters to form alliances in their
search for the owl and it has allowed Valentin to
keep an omniscient watch on the progress of the
hunt. But within hours of the hunt's start weird
messages began to arrive. "I received lots of
offers, some of them were offering three million
francs -- that's three times more than the owl is
worth. People want to find the owl because they are
obsessed or impassioned, not for the money. I also
get a lot of ladies "you know," Valentin laughs. "I
promise you I haven't taken any of them up on the
offer."
Then came the death
threats. Valentin puts a brave face on them: "Most
of them are just pathetic: 'If you don't tell me
where the owl is I'm going to kill you.'" As time
went by the messages got sicker. Some of them read:
'You have children don't you? Tell me where the owl
is hidden.' These are the ones that can really make
Valentin sweat. "These people are nutcases," he
says. His only comfort is that he had the foresight
to adopt the persona of Max.
Not all the messages,
however, are nasty -- although even the friendly
ones betray an unnerving detachment from reality.
"One couple went out to the woods in the middle of
the night with a spade but instead of digging --
guess what they did? And nine months later they
wrote to me and said because of the owl we now have
a baby. When people are married I am the first one
to know. One man wrote to me to say he had won a
car and another woman used to write to me about how
upset she was about her father's remarriage. I
reply to them, but I'm not a doctor, what can I
say?"
Valentin's problems do not
stop with the Minitel. He has received thousands of
letters and some of them are eighty pages long. He
calculated that if he tried to read them it would
take him eight hours a day for three months. So he
does not open them anymore. Instead, they go into a
storehouse and they will be opened if and when
somebody finds the owl. But ignoring the hunters
doesn't make them go away and many of them are
dedicating their time to finding Valentin: "Some of
them think I am a rock star, others think a TV
journalist or a politician, even a round-the-world
yachtsmen." A few of them have found him. Valentin
was asked to go on a TV programme about the hunt.
Afterwards he waited for half an hour before
leaving then drove on to a restaurant with his
fellow guests. He was watching carefully to make
sure nobody was following him. After their meal
Valentin drove one of the guests back to her hotel
before heading home. When he walked in he switched
on one of his Minitels and was dismayed:
"Your car plates are
number blah, blah, blah. You dropped so and so at
such and such a hotel at five past midnight
exactly, then you drove off. All the details were
there and I had seen nobody, honestly. It's not a
question of being paranoid, I was very careful.
When I left the studio the car park was empty and I
could have seen if anybody was following me."
Somebody obviously took delight in posing an
unnerving puzzle which Valentin could not solve.
Others have rung him at home and his 10-year-old
daughter knows she must say she has never heard of
anyone by the name of Max Valentin.
So why has nobody found
the owl? Valentin shrugs: "Good question. I have no
idea. Reading the messages I get on my screen I
will see one and think, ah, here is a guy who is on
the right track and then four or five days later I
find him on another track that is wrong. People
take three steps forward and two back." If anyone
can find the owl it is Gerald Gay and
Valentin takes great delight in Dr Gay's lack of
success -- "You should ask him why he hasn't found
it," he chuckles. Valentin regularly sends Gay
messages teasing him about his lack of success, but
he says Gay is the best treasure hunter in France.
Gay is one of the more lucid hunters, but there are
degrees of madness
"Dr Gay is dangerous to
people who set hunts," says Valentin. "Mr Valentin
said that about me?" Asks the doctor puffing with
pride. He does not look dangerous, this slightly
built immunologist with a squeaky voice, sitting in
his treasure hunting room in the sleepy town of
Angers, an hour and a half by train from Paris.
Indeed his long-suffering wife Claudine, a black
belt in Kendo, is likely to be much more dangerous
if Gay does not stop spending most of his life
searching for treasure. "I went to Paris and bought
her some earrings with my last winnings," confides
Gay. To date he has found six treasures and made
about £100,000 from his hunts. He has been hot
on the trail of the owl since the day the book was
published.
Gay does not hesitate to
cancel patient appointments to follow up a lead in
his hunt for the owl. There is not a minute of the
day when he is not looking for it: "I think about
it all the time: when I'm working, or driving my
car, or reading a book, or watching TV or now,
speaking to you, I may have an inspiration." One
can't help wondering where this commitment stops.
"Every weekend or holidays I only work on treasure
hunts. Sometimes I tell my secretary no more
appointments, and the patients who already have an
appointment? I tell her they can wait. If only they
knew. They think I am at a conference when really I
am at home." Is he mad? "It depends what you define
as mad, if I tell you that I sometimes work 20
hours non-stop on a riddle does that make me
crazy?"
Adds the doctor at the end
of our meeting: "The three most important treasures
in my life are my wife and two children." His wife
Claudine rolls her eyeballs heavenward, such
platitudes will not wash with this woman much
put-upon and surrounded by reminders of her
husband's endless hunt for the elusive owl --
posters, diagrams, aerial photographs, charts,
maps, photocopies and a shelf laden with model
owls. He admits: "It is like being a drug addict.
When I find a solution it is like a climax in my
head. To be frank I think I will find it. Max has
said I am in the top five people looking for
it."
Valentin is distressed by
some of the repercussions of his game, but he
evidently relishes the power and the feeling of
intellectual superiority. But for how long can he
maintain his current lifestyle? Why doesn't he just
tell everyone where it is? "It would be a betrayal.
All these people would kill me." And although he
does not mean it literally, he does not miss the
irony: "I'm a prisoner," he says bluntly. So he
would like someone to hurry up and find it? "I
wouldn't mind. Eventually I will wake up one
morning and say enough is enough. It might be
tomorrow or next month or next year. Then I will
publish a clue that will turn the hunt into a race
for the six or seven people who are closest to
finding it." Until then Valentin will continue to
look over his shoulder wherever he goes. He leaves
the café and hails a taxi. Tonight he
expects to stay up to 3am responding to messages on
his Minitel and one suspects that like his public
Valentin himself has been ensnared -- perhaps he is
obsessed -- by the curious search for his golden
owl.
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